Trainwreck Is a Great Rom-Com Because It's Not a Rom-Com

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Trainwreck Is a Great Rom-Com Because It's Not a Rom-Com

Universal Studios

Three weeks ago, on Michael Ian Black's How To Be Amazing podcast, Amy Schumer detailed how she trashed her first screenplay for Judd Apatow. "I was trying to write a movie that I thought Judd Apatow would want," she says. But he said, 'Think about the movie people want from you. Like, what's going on with you?" That turned into a second screenplay, which became Schumer's first major film, Trainwreck; whether it's the movie people want from her, however, depends less on her than on the her people want to see.

After three steadily improving seasons, her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, has rocketed the comedian to stardom thanks to bracing, clever deconstructions of sexual politics and gender dynamics. She's been doing standup for years, and while the two personae—standup Schumer and writer/actor Schumer—aren't vastly different, there's still enough space between the two that expectation becomes a factor. Thankfully, while Trainwreck isn't as break-the-wheel bold as we've come to love from Inside, it's a romantic comedy that remedies the triteness of the form while maintaining its structural necessities.

Schumer plays Amy, a writer at a men's magazine; she's been assigned to write a profile of Dr. Aaron Connors (Bill Hader) a cutting-edge sports surgeon working with professional athletes like LeBron James. Things, as they tend do in rom-coms, heat up. (The film's only major misstep is the are-we-still-doing-this? trope of female journalists who sleep with their subjects.) Amy's never been much for monogamy, a trait she attributes to her father (Colin Quinn), but with Aaron she finds herself actually caring about a guy for the first time. The arc is what we know to expect from the genre: from resistance to relationship, fighting to breakup, and so on.

Part of what improves upon those paint-by-number mechanics, though, is Schumer's boundless confidence as a performer—even in the face of Tilda Swinton's withering insults (which, of course, Schumer herself wrote). And due credit goes to Hader, who's as effective as a cool-headed straight man as he is at chameleonic impersonations. Their romance is sweet and believable, especially when Schumer uses a self-deprecating voiceover to bemoan how they fit into a pattern. That extra layer, that wink of awareness, insulates Trainwreck from being considered a romantic comedy in the same vein as How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days or You've Got Mail. It's more of a brusquely comedic romance—which makes sense, since Schumer says she was falling in love while writing the script, and mixed that in along with elements of her own family history (she's a child of divorce and her father has multiple sclerosis). In fact, it's that distinction that makes the movie a perfect inclusion in Judd Apatow's filmography.

For people who expect Inside Amy Schumer, though, that Apatowness isn't what they were looking for, and it makes the director the scapegoat for their complaints that Trainwreck isn't as acerbic as the show. Granted, Apatow produced and directed the film, and helped shepherd Schumer through writing the script, but Schumer has sole screenplay credit. What can be credited (or debited) to Apatow is the overlong 124-minute runtime. That bloat is a side-effect of improv-heavy scenes that don't have a precise endpoint—and it's a criticism that can be lobbed at every single one of his films.

But it's easy to see why Apatow was eager to direct the movie. His penchant for atypical families is no mystery. The 40-Year-Old Virgin features Steve Carrell's character falling in love with Catherine Keener, a mother of two. In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl make the best of an unplanned pregnancy. This Is 40, Apatow's most autobiographical film, is precisely about the impossibility of maintaining the American ideal of the perfect family, and how compromise and sacrifice lay beneath the surface of any long-term successful marriage.

In keeping with that, Amy's sister in Trainwreck (played by the ever-dependable Brie Larson) is married with a stepson and another baby on the way—yet another deferral of the 2.5 kids white picket fence family. Apatow's films, and Schumer's script, don't insist that having a typical family is necessary to happiness. Instead, they explore how incomplete people become complete: admitting the pain of solitude, and working to build beneficial companionship. Hader's character is key here, meeting Amy's self-sabotage and crippling doubt with a calming presence; instead of acting like a typical rom-com male lead, he wants to slow things down and talk them out. It leads to a more sensible, nuanced, and ultimately rewarding depiction of modern romance (amid the expected cornucopia of sex jokes).

No, Trainwreck isn't as incendiary or subversive as Inside Amy Schumer's best sketches, nor as ambitious as Schumer's directorial debut in the episode-long homage to 12 Angry Men this past season. But it's a welcome combination of the R-rated sex comedy and the familiar romantic comedy structure. It's also Judd Apatow's best film since Knocked Up–and it bodes well for Schumer's future as both a film actress and a creative force behind the camera.